On average, a typical US household spends $90 a year on ink cartridge and toner costs. Costco has a new inkjet cartridge refill service in many locations. They do this in the Photo center. Not only do you save money over purchasing a new cartridge, you also reduce waste by recycling what you already have. Ink cartridges need to be used regularly, otherwise they begin to dry up and clog the printer’s nozzles.

Refilling a HP 901 XL Black cartridge costs $9.99, buying a new one costs $29.99. You can find re-manufactured ink cartridges from Amazon for even less cost than refilling.

Infotrends estimates that roughly 85% of printer cartridges are thrown away after just one use or 350 million empty cartridges are ending up in landfills.

Refilling Inkjet Cartridges

You should refill the ink cartridge as soon as possible after running low on ink.  If you continue to print with one color empty, the print head nozzles will be damaged and the cartridge may not refill properly. We have had Costco tell us that they could not refill our cartridge because one color was totally dry. You can refill the cartridge roughly two to eight times before you have to buy a new one. Keep the cartridge in a ‘print head down’ position as much as possible.

Refilled ink cartridges are usually about 95% Full, so you may not get quite as many prints. Archival quality prints may not maintain their quality for as long, but refilled ink cartridges are fine for every letters, invoices, labels, etc.  If you need top quality photo prints, visit the kiosk at your local Walgreens or Costco.

Ink cartridges are big money makers for printer companies like HP.  They label their cartridges with “Intended for single use only.” and “No licensed for modification”. When looking for a new printer, be sure to review ink costs before buying. A bad refill job may result in the leak inside your printer or printer heads being clogged, but probably not any hardware problem.

It is illegal for printer manufacturers to void printer warranties if you use third party inkjet cartridges.  If the refill breaks your printer, then you probably will not get a free repair.

Refilling Cartridges at Home

If Costco does not refill a certain ink cartridge (Epson for instance), try some online vendors that may have inkjet cartridge refill kits. It is messy refilling your own ink cartridge using syringes but you can save even more money.  Unfortunately, some inkjet cartridges have computer chips to prevent refilling. You can also buy a tank based ink system. These are best for people that print high volumes of items.

Buying a New Printer

When buying a new inkjet printer, consider not just its features, performance, cost per page, and printing quality but also the costs of supplies and availability of 3rd party ink and refillable inkjet cartridges. Often times, the cheapest printers has the highest printed cost per page. More expensive printers can use high capacity cartridges. Look for printers with average cost per page around 2 cents by diving price of ink cartridge by number of pages it prints per cartridge. Some office oriented printers like the HP OfficeJet Pro 8500 have a low print cost per page but do not take into account all consumables like print heads.

Laser printers

If you mainly print in black and white, consider getting an inexpensive black-and-white laser printer instead of a color inkjet printer. Laser printers use a toner cartridge that can sit unused for months, and have a significantly lower cost per page, and print faster when compared to a color inkjet printer. Cost per page is typically around $0.02 or less versus $0.04 or more for color inkjet printers.

Be sure to read our article Inkjet and Toner Saving Software and Solutions to learn about software solutions to reduce ink cartridge usage.

We have covered the costs, non eco friendliness, and inconvenient inkjet printer cartridge area in several articles including refilling inkjet cartridges.  We recently ran across several software programs that claim to help reduce the amount of ink you use while maintaining high resolution quality prints.

Ecofont is a free typeface that looks like Arial but has lots of little holes punched in it, so it will require up to 20% less ink to print. At sizes of 12 point or larger, the holes are very visible. Selecting the font Century Gothic will also reduce the amount of ink that is needed.

inkgard costs $9.99 a year and claims to have upto 75% ink & toner savings. It works on your PC in the background and uses ‘intelligent image processing’ to prevent wasteful overlapping of droplets and toner particles.  They also sell replacement ink.

PretonSaver claims they will save you up to 50% using Pixel Optimizer technology to identify and delete wasteful pixels. Free 30 day trial. $19.99 for a 1 year subscription.

inksaver is another ink saving program that costs about $32 and works with Window.  At least it does not charge by the year. Free 15 day trial.

Kodak inkjet printers have been shown to yield a lower cost printing solution. They charge a fair price on the printer and lower prices on ink.

A free option is to select extremely low-quality, low-ink/toner, b&w printing options in your print options.

Hopefully someday these optimizations will be added to printer drivers themselves. Unfortunately the printer companies have no incentive to do this.

We recently bought an HP Officejet Pro 8500 all in one inkjet printer on sale for $149 plus tax from Staples.  It is quite a decent printer, scanner, and fax machine.  The software is a lot less bloated that HP consumer oriented printers. One bad thing is the long 2 minute warm up time.

It is Energy star qualified and sips very little power when turned off. HP touts it as Saving upto $500 a year compared with color laser printers.  It has individual color ink cartridges that you can replace as they run out.  Also available are extra large cartridges that help save money and approach 2 cents per printed page.

Some issues are of cost of consumables. The Black ink extra large cartridge costs $35.99 and are good for 2200 prints. The three colors ones cost $26 a piece and are good for 1400 prints. Of course your mileage will vary.  This OfficeJet Pro 8500 printer also uses two printheads that cost $60 each.  There is no approximate data on when they need to be replaced.  Filling this baby full of new ink and print heads costs $234!  It is cheaper for me to purchase an EXTRA printer for spare ink and heads.

HP makes its money on supplies so they have special 940 series ink cartridges that are not refillable and have not been cloned by 3rd parties.

Before you buy a new printer, check to see how much ink costs and whether compatible or refillable ink is available. Also check out our list of inkjet and toner saving software.